Donald Trump meant everything he said.The New Economy involves phasing out all aspects of the old, including personnel.by: Christopher Caldwell

Globalisation is sucking the lifeblood out of the American yeomanry, one decaf mocha extra-skim Frappuccino at a time: anyone surprised that US President Donald Trump feels this way did not pay much attention to last November’s election. Yet Friday’s inaugural address seems to have thrown Mr Trump’s adversaries into a state of shock. It turns out he actually meant those things. He spoke of “America first” as his principle; “protection” as his policy and “buy American” as his motto. Millions gathered on Saturday in cities across the country and globally for “women’s marches” to protest against his presidency. Mr Trump accepts the radical implications of his world view. In fact, he has a good chance of enacting it.That Mr Trump’s oratory has the power to shock is a vindication of sorts. His campaign was about things that are invisible to ruling-class America, starting with non-ruling class America. Invisibility, anonymity, voicelessness was the theme of the whole speech: “One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores,” he said, “with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind”.This sentence sounds like it is about deindustrialisation, but it is just as much about rulers’ hubris. The climax of the speech is: “Hear these words: You will never be ignored again.” Mr Trump thus proposes a new identity for the ruling class: not as compassionate champions of the excluded, not as bold captains of industry, not even as thoughtful defenders of common decency — but as pigs at the trough.Almost every newspaper writer is convinced Mr Trump’s remarks were a vulgar embarrassment. That is a rash judgment. In a country where marketing patter is the lingua franca and most of the 324m residents have a knack for it, Mr Trump has just run the single most effective marketing campaign that any American ever ran for anything.If you pay attention to the speech, it sounds less like a rant and far more like a serious governing programme. One phrase — “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now”— has struck people as a reference to slum violence, and indeed that is what it would have meant had a president used it a generation ago. But its position in the speech makes it likely that Mr Trump is alluding to the wave of overdoses, mostly involving heroin and other opioids, in suburbs and small towns. This is the deadliest US drug crisis ever. It is killing 50,000 Americans a year, more than guns or motor vehicles do. In the 1970s, Curtis Mayfield sang about drugs and crime in the ghetto. In the 1980s, two presidents waged a “war on drugs”. Today’s overdoses are beneath the notice of either the government or the culture. Mr Trump ran a strong campaign in New Hampshire and West Virginia, the two hardest-hit states.

Another widely misread phrase is “We have defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own”. This does not, as many listeners assume, contradict Mr Trump’s promise elsewhere in the speech to “reinforce old alliances”. It attempts to re-establish the principle that countries have the right to defend their borders against not just armies but also immigrants.Neglected, too, was Mr Trump’s resurrection of the 19th-century word “protection” as his preferred term for tariffs. Today it sounds as quaint as old disease names such as “consumption” and “dropsy.” Usually we speak of protectionism, the presumably extremist ideology that opposes free trade. But Mr Trump is signalling that we are wrong to confuse the two. For him the difference between protection and protectionism is like the difference between Islam and Islamism. He is trying to make tariffs thinkable.In fact he has already done so. Mr Trump has thrown a few gauntlets at the feet of corporate executives, and won. When General Motors announces a plan to invest $1bn in US jobs, as it did in the days before the inauguration, the sentiment can only rise among swing voters that Mr Trump must be right. Ditto when the US’s European allies begin reprioritising budgets to bring defence expenditures to 2 per cent of GDP. In the wake of Mr Trump’s election, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, promised to raise budgets. Formerly truculent Lithuania promised to bring its defence expenditures up to the Nato-standard 2 per cent of GDP by 2018, two years earlier than promised.There is nothing especially radical about Mr Trump’s diagnosis of globalisation, except that he seems sincere about it. Every western politician of the past 20 years, from Hillary Clinton to Helmut Kohl to Jeremy Corbyn, has bemoaned that it leaves people behind. But they did not understand that the New Economy was a new economy. It involved phasing out every aspect of the old economy, including its personnel. The theorists of the New Economy said it should be possible to compensate the “losers”. But that never happened. Because when the money came in, the people who managed the new economy did not recognise the losers as belonging to the same community. Perhaps the surprise is that it took as long as it did for a US politician to argue that, if the system’s leaders cannot be trusted to reform it from within, they must be ordered to do so from without.

The writer is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and is writing a book on the rise and fall of the post-1960s political order.

Some have started to openly inquire about how states could exit the monetary union.

By Antonia Colibasanu

In our 2017 forecast, we said that the evolution of the Italian banking crisis will force a confrontation between Italy, Germany and the European Union. The groundwork for this confrontation was laid last year, and the face-off has further evolved already this year. In December 2016, two Italian members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the populist Europe of Nations and Freedom group asked the European Central Bank (ECB) in a letter to explain the “widening balance divergences between individual countries [in the eurozone] since the 2008 crisis.” They also asked the ECB “how the balances would, technically, be settled, especially those in net debtor countries, should a Member State participating in the system decide to quit the single currency.”This is the first time that MEPs have inquired about what leaving the eurozone would look like. ECB President Mario Draghi responded in a letter to the two politicians on Jan. 19. He first explained the reasons for imbalances and how the eurozone payment system works and concluded by saying, “if a country were to leave the Eurosystem, its national central bank’s claims on or liabilities to the ECB would need to be settled in full.” For the Italians, this issue has more to do with national politics than the European Union. Italy will hold general elections in 2017 or 2018. Its internal debate regarding EU membership will be central to its dialogue with the EU. The power dynamics between the two entities will continue to unfold throughout the year.The European Central Bank is pictured prior to a press conference following the meeting of the Governing Council in Frankfurt/Main, on Jan. 19, 2017. DANIEL ROLAND/AFP/Getty Images Power is a key concept in geopolitics. The extent to which a country has, or lacks, power dictates which deals (including treaties) can be made, broken or left in place. To reverse a deal, power is needed. Understanding how you acquire power is key to assessing whether change is possible. Deals, in the form of treaties, are often signed after wars are fought. These deals are difficult, if not impossible, to reverse because the road to reaching such a deal entails extremely high costs, including loss of life and a country’s physical destruction. Other deals seem easier to dismantle, as they appear to be mostly political.

The European Union is essentially a deal between nation-states to form a union with the hope that peace and prosperity would result. Political cooperation, first inspired by fear of renewed war and later by hope for growth, led to the bloc’s formation. The fear of renewed war led to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community through the Paris Treaty in 1951. Hope for growth led to the Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992 by the members of the European Community. This treaty led to the EU’s founding and the creation of the eurozone. Both treaties aimed to create a level of peace and prosperity that member states did not have the power to produce on their own. They feared renewed conflict, as they remembered World War II’s impact on the Continent. They also understood they could not afford massive destruction and rebuilding efforts for a third time.

But in the European Union’s formation, Europe didn’t experience anything comparable to the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, where the Union Army fought and won against the Confederate Army. The European Union’s founding was more a result of political negotiations than a military battle. The EU was not an ideal solution for the Europeans – but it was seen by European countries and their political leadership at the time as an opportunity for growth.

Today, neither prosperity nor peace is guaranteed through European Union membership. The days of European politicians promising prosperity through integration ended with the 2008 financial crisis. The refugee crisis and terrorist attacks in Europe have threatened to disrupt peace. The EU couldn’t effectively address either crisis and citizens started questioning whether membership was worth the cost. With public discontent growing, populism and nationalism are on the rise. Anti-establishment, populist parties have won seats not only in national parliaments but also in the European Parliament. A significant number of the politicians from these parties represent countries that have experienced severe effects from the economic crisis – such as Italy, Greece and Spain – or countries that have seen a dramatic rise in Euroskepticism in the last few years – such as the United Kingdom.

Draghi’s response to the Italian MEPs’ question marked one of the first instances in which a European authority acknowledged parameters for leaving the bloc. In fact, the European treaty does not have a provision detailing how a member would exit the eurozone, and this is not a mere oversight. There are no norms or procedures that outline how a withdrawal would proceed. The monetary union was considered irrevocable and irreversible. When the Maastricht Treaty was signed, member states thought it was inconceivable that any countries would want to withdraw from the eurozone. Including such a clause in the treaty would have meant acknowledging that membership may have negative effects on states in the future. Taking such a possibility into account would have implied that prosperity was not a given and undermined the promise and purpose of the treaty. Countries would have been forced to question their transfer of powers to the bloc.But at the same time, member states didn’t want to give up their authority over fiscal policy – and thus only gave the ECB control over monetary policy. That was their deal: They wanted to hold full political power at home and transfer power over one area, which they thought would limit the costs of financial transactions between member states. They dismissed the fact that these transactions were unbalanced, as the level of trade between countries was unequal and members’ socio-economic environments were very different. But while members maintained hope that the EU would bring growth and prosperity, their deal worked out well.This is no longer the case, which is glaringly apparent in the letters exchanged between the Italian MEPs and Draghi. Problems appeared as the 2008 crisis hit, and economic differences became visible. While Draghi has rarely mentioned the possibility of a country leaving the eurozone, it was discussed in official spheres during the summer of 2015, when Greece faced its own financial crisis. Italy is far from being in a comparable position at the moment. But Europe has grown accustomed to nationalism and populism since the Greek crisis, and radical positions by politicians are no longer the exception but the norm.

The European Union’s economic crisis is political. The deal that was signed in the early ’90s in Maastricht, and updated in Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon, seems to be no longer relevant. There are no ideas on how to improve or reverse it. But political deals can be changed, and the will to make this happen is growing stronger as countries see that it may be in their national interests to reclaim their monetary power, for better or worse.

America’s most progressive state is set to lead the new fight against federal power.

ON NOVEMBER 9th, as it started to sink in that Donald Trump would be their president too, Californians expressed their anger and disappointment in different and creative ways. Some took to the streets and burnt papier-mâché effigies of Mr Trump’s bronzed face. Others chanted “not my president” and waved signs that read “Immigrants Make America Great” and “Deport Trump”. Kevin de León and Anthony Rendon, the leaders of the California Senate and Assembly, respectively, released a statement.“Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land, because yesterday Americans expressed their views on a pluralistic and democratic society that are clearly inconsistent with the values of the people of California,” it read. “We will lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our constitution.” As Mr Trump takes residence in the White House, California’s lawmakers are putting their words into action. They will have plenty of examples to follow. During the Obama administration, Texas and Oklahoma were strident advocates for state sovereignty. Several other states also challenged the federal government in court and by making their own laws. Indeed calls for states’ rights and limited federal power have been a defining feature of American conservatism since the New Deal, says Ilya Somin, a federalism expert at George Mason University. But with the election of Mr Trump, whose party controls both houses of Congress and who plans to appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court, it is Democrats who find themselves turning to the states as bulwarks of resistance. California, America’s most populous and progressive state, will lead the blue-state opposition.California has plumped for Democrats since the early 1990s—Hillary Clinton won by a margin of 30 percentage points. It is one of six states where Democrats hold the governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature. But Californians’ opposition to Mr Trump goes beyond partisanship. If America’s new president honours his promises to deport illegal immigrants, repeal the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare) and relax environmental protections, California—America’s largest economy—stands to lose more than any other state.More than 3m undocumented immigrants call the Golden State home, reckons the Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank. (Texas, the second most popular state for undocumented foreigners, has less than half as many.) These workers make up nearly 10% of the workforce and contribute $130bn—or about 5%—of the state’s annual output, according to a 2014 study. Health Access California, a consumer advocacy group, estimates that the state government could lose $22bn in federal funding annually if Obamacare is gutted; some 5m Californians could find themselves without health coverage. And even though Mr Trump has vowed to axe Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have regulated carbon emissions from power plants, California is likely to continue complying with—or even exceed—the requirements laid out in the framework. But its companies might find themselves at a competitive disadvantage if other states do not.Politicians from California and other blue states plan to resist Mr Trump using three main tools: legislation, litigation and circumvention.Start with legislation. On December 5th California’s lawmakers introduced a package of laws to impede mass deportation. One bill would create a programme to fund legal representation for immigrants in deportation hearings. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, announced earlier this month that he would launch a similar fund. A recent national study found that immigrants with legal counsel were five-and-a-half times more likely to avoid deportation than if they represented themselves. Yet only 14% of detained immigrants in deportation proceedings had lawyers. Gun control, health care and environmental policy are other areas where Democrat-dominated states might focus in the coming years, says John Hudak, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The leaves are Brown

Several states are also getting ready to challenge the Trump administration in court. Maura Healey, the attorney-general of Massachusetts, which has a Republican governor, and Eric Schneiderman, the attorney-general of New York, have both expressed their willingness to square off against the federal government. Earlier this month the California State Legislature announced that it had retained Eric Holder, who served as Mr Obama’s attorney-general, as outside counsel. He will work with the state’s next attorney-general to bring suits against the federal government. California’s decision to hire outside counsel is distinctive, but litigation as a means of stalling the federal government is hardly new. In 2010 a group of mostly Republican attorneys-general filed a lawsuit to block Obamacare. According to analysis by the Texas Tribune, the Lone Star State sued the Obama administration at least 48 times during Mr Obama’s term. Hiring Mr Holder “sends a message to the administration about the state’s resolve to defend our people, our diversity, and economic output,” says Mr de León.Some potential suits are starting to take shape. Gavin Newsom, California’s lieutenant-governor who will run for governor in 2018, has said that the state could sue under the California Environmental Quality Act or its federal equivalent to quash Mr Trump’s plans for a wall along the border with Mexico. The argument would rest on the claim that construction of the wall could upset water flows and quality as well as wildlife. Richard Revesz, an environmental-policy expert at New York University’s School of Law, says Democratic states could also sue to slow the repeal of the Clean Power Plan.The final way in which blue states can resist Mr Trump’s policy agenda is by trying to get around federal policy. California already has cap-and-trade agreements with foreign jurisdictions such as Québec. Mr de León says that, under the Trump administration the state will work to expand such programmes. Since 2009 nine states in the north-east have participated in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade programme. Even if climate protections are relaxed under Mr Trump, such an alliance could continue.On immigration, California has legislation preventing local jails from holding people for extra time just so that federal immigration enforcement officers can deport them. So-called “sanctuary cities” in other states, including Chicago, New York, Seattle and others, have pledged to protect their undocumented residents in similar ways. Such policies are likely to be effective at obstructing a massive dragnet; there are 5,800 federal deportation agents compared with more than 750,000 state and local police officers. Deporting undocumented immigrants without local co-operation is much more difficult.Mr Trump has threatened to cut federal funding for jurisdictions that insist on adhering to “sanctuary” policies, but Mr Somin suggests that courts may not look kindly on such an action. In 2012 the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government cannot force states to bend to its wishes with a financial “gun to the head”. Although much about the next four years is unpredictable, one thing seems clear: the courts will be busy.

THE timing was ominous. A day after the first, seemingly cordial telephone conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the residents of Avdiivka, a small town on the Ukrainian side of the conflict line with Russian-backed separatists, heard the echoes of heavy artillery fire. The conflict that Russia started in Ukraine in 2014 has been partly frozen over the past two years. But on January 29th it flared up with renewed force.Three days later, on February 1st, the bodies of seven Ukrainian soldiers killed in the fighting were brought to Kiev. Maidan, the city square that was the site of the country’s 2014 revolution, once again swelled with people. Social media were filled with messages of support for soldiers and calls to collect supplies for victims, along with videos of shelling by Russian Grad rockets. Ukrainian soldiers received text messages seemingly sent by the Russian side: “You are just meat to your commanders”. Since then other Ukrainian positions along the front line have been attacked, and the death toll is rising.

Following the flare-up, international ceasefire monitors blamed “combined Russian-separatist forces” for starting the attacks. Ukrainian forces have been creeping forward into the “grey zone” in recent months, seizing positions in several small towns. The rebels might have felt it was an opportune moment to hit back.Whoever started the fighting, its victims are the 16,000 civilians in Avdiivka, who for days were cut off from electricity in temperatures of -20°C, and those in the rebel-held territories, many of whom lack water. The violence underscores the difficulty of implementing the Minsk Two ceasefire agreement, signed in February 2015, which the two sides interpret differently. For Kiev and its Western backers, the agreement is a path for Ukraine to reassert control over its east and close its border with Russia, followed by a decentralisation of power to its regions. Russia, however, sees the agreement as a way of retaining control over eastern Ukraine, keeping the border open and demanding that Kiev recognise Donbas as an autonomous region within Ukraine. This would give Russia permanent influence over Ukraine’s future.From Ukraine’s point of view, the violence was a warning to its American and European allies, several of whom are considering lifting sanctions against Russia. “Who would dare talk about lifting the sanctions in such circumstances?” asked Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, who cut short a visit to Germany to attend to the crisis. Mr Poroshenko later said he would call a national referendum on joining NATO—which Russia considers a red line and NATO itself does not want.

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Doubting the Donald

Many Russia-watchers think Mr Putin may have stoked the conflict to test his new American counterpart. Mr Trump has promised better relations with Moscow. Mr Putin may have decided to probe his willingness to turn a blind eye to Russian actions in Ukraine, the two countries’ main point of conflict. The Russian government says Ukraine was discussed in their telephone conversation.In the past, significant escalations of fighting were quickly met by the White House or the State Department with strongly worded statements condemning Russian aggression and supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity. This time it took the State Department two days to say it was “deeply concerned”; it did not mention Russia. This response was duly noted in Moscow. “Washington does put the blame on the [separatist] republics, does not express support for Kiev and does not say a word about Russia’s role,” Rossiiskaia Gazeta, the official government newspaper, wrote jubilantly.The Kremlin also noted the American failure to react to the news that Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner, would be tried again on trumped-up charges. Mr Navalny pledged to run against Mr Putin in next year’s presidential elections, but is now likely to observe Mr Putin’s re-election from a prison cell.

NEW DELHI – If there is one thing at which China’s leaders truly excel, it is the use of economic tools to advance their country’s geostrategic interests. Through its $1 trillion “one belt, one road” initiative, China is supporting infrastructure projects in strategically located developing countries, often by extending huge loans to their governments. As a result, countries are becoming ensnared in a debt trap that leaves them vulnerable to China’s influence.

Of course, extending loans for infrastructure projects is not inherently bad. But the projects that China is supporting are often intended not to support the local economy, but to facilitate Chinese access to natural resources, or to open the market for low-cost and shoddy Chinese goods. In many cases, China even sends its own construction workers, minimizing the number of local jobs that are created.

Several of the projects that have been completed are now bleeding money. For example, Sri Lanka’s Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, which opened in 2013 near Hambantota, has been dubbed the world’s emptiest. Likewise, Hambantota’s Magampura Mahinda Rajapaksa Port remains largely idle, as does the multibillion-dollar Gwadar port in Pakistan.

For China, however, these projects are operating exactly as needed: Chinese attack submarines have twice docked at Sri Lankan ports, and two Chinese warships were recently pressed into service for Gwadar port security.

In a sense, it is even better for China that the projects don’t do well. After all, the heavier the debt burden on smaller countries, the greater China’s own leverage becomes. Already, China has used its clout to push Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand to block a united ASEAN stand against China’s aggressive pursuit of its territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Moreover, some countries, overwhelmed by their debts to China, are being forced to sell to it stakes in Chinese-financed projects or hand over their management to Chinese state-owned firms. In financially risky countries, China now demands majority ownership up front. For example, China clinched a deal with Nepal this month to build another largely Chinese-owned dam there, with its state-run China Three Gorges Corporation taking a 75% stake.

As if that were not enough, China is taking steps to ensure that countries will not be able to escape their debts. In exchange for rescheduling repayment, China is requiring countries to award it contracts for additional projects, thereby making their debt crises interminable. Last October, China canceled $90 million of Cambodia’s debt, only to secure major new contracts.

Some developing economies are regretting their decision to accept Chinese loans. Protests have erupted over widespread joblessness, purportedly caused by Chinese dumping of goods, which is killing off local manufacturing, and exacerbated by China’s import of workers for its own projects.

New governments in several countries, from Nigeria to Sri Lanka, have ordered investigations into alleged Chinese bribery of the previous leadership. Last month, China’s acting ambassador to Pakistan, Zhao Lijian, was involved in a Twitter spat with Pakistani journalists over accusations of project-related corruption and the use of Chinese convicts as laborers in Pakistan (not a new practice for China). Zhao described the accusations as “nonsense.”

In retrospect, China’s designs might seem obvious. But the decision by many developing countries to accept Chinese loans was, in many ways, understandable. Neglected by institutional investors, they had major unmet infrastructure needs. So when China showed up, promising benevolent investment and easy credit, they were all in. It became clear only later that China’s real objectives were commercial penetration and strategic leverage; by then, it was too late, and countries were trapped in a vicious cycle.

Sri Lanka is Exhibit A. Though small, the country is strategically located between China’s eastern ports and the Mediterranean. Chinese President Xi Jinping has called it vital to the completion of the maritime Silk Road.

China began investing heavily in Sri Lanka during the quasi-autocratic nine-year rule of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, and China shielded Rajapaksa at the United Nations from allegations of war crimes. China quickly became Sri Lanka’s leading investor and lender, and its second-largest trading partner, giving it substantial diplomatic leverage.

It was smooth sailing for China, until Rajapaksa was unexpectedly defeated in the early 2015 election by Maithripala Sirisena, who had campaigned on the promise to extricate Sri Lanka from the Chinese debt trap. True to his word, he suspended work on major Chinese projects.

But it was too late: Sri Lanka’s government was already on the brink of default. So, as a Chinese state mouthpiece crowed, Sri Lanka had no choice but “to turn around and embrace China again.” Sirisena, in need of more time to repay old loans, as well as fresh credit, acquiesced to a series of Chinese demands, restarting suspended initiatives, like the $1.4 billion Colombo Port City, and awarding China new projects.

Sirisena also recently agreed to sell an 80% stake in the Hambantota port to China for about $1.1 billion. According to China’s ambassador to Sri Lanka, Yi Xianliang, the sale of stakes in other projects is also under discussion, in order to help Sri Lanka “solve its finance problems.” Now, Rajapaksa is accusing Sirisena of granting China undue concessions.

By integrating its foreign, economic, and security policies, China is advancing its goal of fashioning a hegemonic sphere of trade, communication, transportation, and security links. If states are saddled with onerous levels of debt as a result, their financial woes only aid China’s neocolonial designs. Countries that are not yet ensnared in China’s debt trap should take note – and take whatever steps they can to avoid it.

MADRID – It is unfortunate that so few international agreements have been reached in recent years. During a period when great-power competition has generally trumped cooperation, two significant exceptions – the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement – offer hope that formalized, multilateral responses to global challenges are still possible.

But now Donald Trump is threatening to renege on both agreements, and his election as President of the United States has revealed their fragility. If the US withdraws from, or fails to comply with, either deal, it will strike a heavy blow to a global-governance system that relies on multilateral agreements to resolve international problems.

To see what is at stake, consider the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between Iran and the E3/EU3+3 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany and the European Union). The JCPOA’s first anniversary coincided with Trump’s inauguration, so it is worth recalling how it came about – and what could happen if it falls apart.

Europeans first made contact with Iran about the issue back in 2003, when they negotiated with then-Secretary of the Iranian National Security Council, Hassan Rouhani. Both sides even reached an agreement in 2004; but it did not last long. In 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election as President of Iran marked a turning point. While the negotiations officially continued, scant progress was made. Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear program advanced rapidly, even as its people suffered under heavy economic sanctions.

Rouhani won Iran’s presidential election in 2013. When he had negotiated with European diplomats in 2003, Iran had a modest nuclear program, and could enrich uranium only with great difficulty. Ten years later, it had installed thousands of centrifuges. Fortunately, tireless diplomatic efforts during the two years following Rouhani’s election culminated in the JCPOA.

Of course, there were vocal critics in the US who did not welcome the agreement, or the prospect of negotiating with Iran at all. And other countries in the Middle East feared that the agreement would alter the regional balance of power and damage their own interests.

Opponents of the deal offered three main reasons for rejecting it: Iran could never be trusted to fulfill its commitments; the agreement would unacceptably elevate Iran’s regional status; and Iran did not deserve the time of day.

In the year since the JCPOA was implemented, has Iran fulfilled its commitments? The International Atomic Energy Agency says that it has. Iran has allowed the IAEA to inspect every site that the agency has requested to see – including those from which it was barred before the agreement – and has granted inspectors access to its electronic systems and chain of enrichment.

The IAEA insists that no country has ever been more closely monitored. As the International Crisis Group points out, “Trump is the first US president in more than two decades who enters office not needing to worry about Iran crossing the threshold to nuclear weaponization undetected.”

To be sure, many of us had hoped that the agreement would noticeably improve Iran’s relations with its neighbors and the US, and that has not happened. The agreement created a diplomatic window to stabilize the region, but that opportunity was squandered. The wars in Syria and Yemen have continued, rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran seems unlikely any time soon, and Russia is visibly asserting itself in the region.

But the blame does not rest with the JCPOA, which was negotiated as a delimited non-proliferation agreement. Taking regional diplomacy any further at that time would have been impossible. But, given the new period of uncertainty under Trump, the European negotiating parties should now assume responsibility for maintaining the JCPOA, and they should urgently propose an initiative to increase stability in the region.

Russia and Turkey convened a meeting in Kazakhstan this month for Syrian rebel groups and the Syrian government to begin peace talks. This effort should be expanded to include other parties, and be used as a first step toward building regional trust. All stakeholders will benefit from putting their energy into peacemaking instead of attacking the Iran agreement.

It is chilling to imagine the current situation without the JCPOA. Troubled Saudi Arabia would like to end its military intervention in Yemen, but that is no easy feat. Iran is commencing a presidential election campaign, while reeling from the death of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and one of the architects of the Islamic Republic. Turkey is seeking an outcome to the Syrian conflict that aligns with its own policy toward the Kurds.

Russia needs to withdraw its troops from Syria – an intervention that has been bleeding its economy. And the EU still needs to resolve the refugee crisis, in a context of regional stability.

Trump should think seriously about America’s interests, and those of the region. If he does, he will realize that the alternative to contributing to regional stability is to risk an even greater nightmare.

If you know the other and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Sun Tzu

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.